The arts pages of newspapers and magazines often have recommendations for holiday reading but I haven’t come across a travel webpage that gives a link to a novel that is set in an exotic holiday destination. Well, not until Google opened up a lovely surprise for me.

I was engrossed in one of my favourite displacement activities: Googling for links to a random range of topics that happened to have caught my attention that day – anything from Aardvarks to the Zodiac . In this case, it was ‘Lamma Island’, for reasons that’ll be clear to followers of this blog, and as I scrolled down the first page that Google had led me to, I found this link.

There was a photo that I recognised and it immediately attracted my attention. You can guess how amazed I was to find a direct reference to my novel, Paper Lanterns, under the heading Lamma Island Holiday Read

“Looking for a book to take on your holiday to Lamma island? Want to read a book that is set in, and captures the spirit and charm of Lamma Island to give you a taste of what to look forward to? Or do you want to relive happy memories of a previous visit? Then take a look at the Christine Coleman’s latest novel, Paper Lanterns.”

As you can see in the review by John Cairns, a resident of Lamma Island himself, I have received the seal of approval for my representation of the island and the lifestyle of its ex-pat inhabitants.
This has made me wonder if there are any other travel sites that have caught on to this idea.

There are a couple of authors in particular whose books immediately spring to mind as ideal for promoting the places in which they are set.
Linda Gillard is renowned, not only for her brilliant writing and strong themes but also for the way she draws the reader into her landscapes and entices them to discover the Isle of Skye for themselves.

Emotional Geology is a novel in which the landscape itself becomes a key character in the story.

On her website, this photo aptly illustrates her explanation of the title:“Rock is a concrete record of the past, of what happened to the Earth – a build-up of pressure, seismic upheaval, erosion. When you look at rock you’re looking at layers of time. I think our minds and our memories are like that - a record of what we’ve been through and the toll it has taken - so the “excavation” of the past (which is what happens in the novel) becomes emotional geology.”.

The heading on the review page of her enthralling second novel, A Lifetime Burning,
would be perfectly at home on any travel webiste: “FIND A PLACE FOR IT IN YOUR HOLIDAY LUGGAGE!”

Among the accolades and prizes for her third book, Star Gazing,
is one that the Scottish Tourist website should include: STAR GAZING was shortlisted for the UK’s first environmental book award, the Robin Jenkins Literary Award, promoting writing inspired by Scotland’s landscape.
(Oh, and as well as being shortlisted for the romantic novel of the year (2009) it was also shortlisted in 2010 for Woman’s Weekly’s “Best Romantic Novel since 1960!)

Adrienne Dines is another author whose novels evoke the differing moods of the geographical and cultural settings of an island –her landscape is rural Ireland with its humour and hospitality and its dark side of shame and buried secrets.
Her first book, Toppling Miss April,
has been described by the Irish Examiner as ‘A cross between Father Ted and Ballykissangel…hilarious!’ There’s no doubt about Adrienne’s wicked sense of humour in this novel,

but her next book, The Jigsaw Maker, moves from affectionately gentle fun and romance to something far darker.

Her third novel , Soft Voices Whispering,has been described as “Hard to put down and impossible to forget, this is a book with a big heart. (And the cover is so bleakly beautiful, it’s worth framing.)”

If you’re planning a holiday anytime now, you couldn’t do better than order some of these books to take with you!

If it hadn’t been for Google alerts, Hermann (aka Lamma-Gung - Managing Editor of Lamma-zine, Webmaster & Moderator of Lamma.com.hk) would never have known that his beloved home, Lamma Island, was the setting for my latest novel, Paper Lanterns.

You can imagine my excitement when, on my return from my recent visit to Hong Kong, this email appeared in my inbox: “I’m editing, photographing and publishing the daily online newspaper for Lamma Island, Lamma.com.hk. I found your blog and would be most interested in getting your book reviewed for the Lamma-zine by one of my regular reviewers or myself. We frequently feature Artists and writers living on Lamma or anything written about our home island.”

That excitement now seems almost mundane compared to what I felt on receiving this glowing review from John Cairns, a writer himself.

It’s always encouraging to get a positive review (I was lucky enough to get lots of these for my first published novel, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society) but I have to admit that I was a little apprehensive when it came to having Paper Lanterns read by people who know Lamma Island and other parts of Hong Kong far better than I do. What if I’d made some major factual errors, or totally failed to capture what the residents consider to be the essence of the place?

Fortunately, this has not been the case, as you can tell from the extracts that he has chosen to include in his review.

As he writes in a separate email, “I enjoyed it a lot and from cover to cover. Admittedly, a big part of the reason to enjoy it so much is the extremely familiar setting. But if Christine had done a bad job with the Lamma setting, it might have been horrendous to read. And in fact, it was very good indeed.”

“Place” has always played an important role in my novels – and I like to read books with vivid descriptions of unfamiliar places that make me feel I’ve been there myself. This was one of the delights in reading Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, for instance. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, set in the Congo, was another.

One thing that interested me when I was reading John Cairns’s review was the way he had picked up on what for most people might have been an insignificant detail:
“Coleman shows a nice touch with details, often inserting meaningful objects at suitable moments. For example, Ann recalls being an angry teenager who retreats to her bedroom and flips through Anne of Green Gables, a classic novel about childhood angst. “

It turns out that John grew up on a farm in Canada’s smallest province, just a few miles from the setting of “Anne of Green Gables, the classic Canadian novel published more than 100 years ago.”

It’s things like this which bring home to me most forcibly how small this world really is!

The review was published on Lamma-zine this Tuesday, 16th March, so there will soon be other articles that push it out of view, so you might need to scroll down a bit before you find it.

Today I’ve been exploring ways of having a cover designed for my new novel, Paper Lanterns. This is a digression. I’d intended to post an account about what happens to a book (in my case, anyway) between the time it’s been accepted by a publisher (what joy!!) and the actual publication date.

This whole blog, Writing Matters, has turned me into a time-traveller, taking me back and forth over more than two decades (with additional interruptions each Sunday when I post my Poem of the Week), and since I’d been remembering my feelings of delight when I was sent the first piece of A4 cardboard showing the front and back cover and the spine for The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society it seemed like a good time to start thinking seriously about the cover for Paper Lanterns.

Browsing through book shops and handling their various covers, has brought home to me that, whatever people might say about not judging a book by its cover, if the cover doesn’t attract the person doing the browsing in the first place, they won’t even pick it up, still less, read the ‘blurb’ on the back and start to make any kind of judgement.

So I opened my copy of my first published book and checked out the name of the company that had produced the cover - Baseline Arts Ltd, Oxford. They’d done a good job with mine and many of the other Transita novels so I looked them up on the web and rang them.

By the end of our conversation, I had a clearer understanding of the importance of the wording on the back cover. I wrote my brief description many months ago now - it’s what I’ve put up on the ‘My Novels’ page above. But then I decided it needed some amendment, so that’s part of what I’ve been doing today -It’s taken me ages to complete this version - and I’ll probably want to tinker with it some more tomorrow. For an experienced writer, I’m ridiculously slow, especially at writing short pieces. Here’s today’s version.

Any commments will be welcomed - and when I’ve got two or three versions of the front cover, I’ll be asking for your opinions too - though that’ll be a while yet.

PAPER LANTERNS

Told with insight and compassion, this novel moves between Hong Kong, Norfolk and the Midlands, and shows how the consequences of an act of infidelity have shaped the lives of three generations of women.

After a phone call from her younger brother, Ann travels to Hong Kong in search of the truth about their scandalous mother, Vivienne. Here, she discovers a series of letters and journal-entries which reveal a secret about her beloved grandmother’s early life that challenges her most deeply felt convictions. Ann must also face up to her own part in an event which took place just before her sixteenth birthday, and caused the break-up of the family.

Hong Kong itself, with its exotic mix of old and new in the bustling urban districts, and the quiet charm of beautiful Lamma Island, plays a key part in Ann’s reappraisal of her own life and marriage, and the unexpected dilemma that confronts her.